Unmanned vehicles generally refer to a type of vehicle that operates without an onboard pilot or driver. Various types of unmanned vehicles have been designed for various purposes and may include, for example, aircraft that travel through air, land-based vehicles that travel over the surface of the ground, and boats that travel over the surface of the water. These unmanned vehicles may be used to accomplish tasks that may generally be too dangerous or impractical for direct human involvement. For example, unmanned vehicles may be used in military missions for reconnaissance of enemy forces over enemy lines to avoid deployment of military personnel in harm's way. Unmanned vehicles may also be used in harsh environments, such as chemically contaminated areas, at high altitudes or in other hazardous environments that may be generally unsuitable for human habitation. Control of unmanned vehicles is typically provided by a vehicle control system that communicates with one or more unmanned vehicles using a wireless radio frequency (RF) communication link. The RF communication link allows these vehicle control systems to maintain operable communication with the unmanned vehicles and thereby maintain positive route control or flight control throughout the course of the missions.
In the past, control of many unmanned vehicles involved sending command and control messages from the vehicle control system to the unmanned vehicle in a proprietary protocol that, in turn, were communicated directly to a route or flight control system. The proprietary protocol is typically specific to the individual unmanned vehicle or a payload disposed onboard the unmanned vehicle and provided by the manufacturer of such. This presented a problem in the industry by creating interoperability issues between the various vehicle control stations and various unmanned vehicles available in the industry.
The solution to minimize inoperability was to design the unmanned vehicles to be able to receive command and control messages in a common format or standardized protocol so that the various available vehicle control stations would be interoperable with the unmanned vehicles. In the course of addressing this need, many unmanned vehicles are now designed today with a vehicle processing system placed on-board the unmanned vehicle that is coupled to, or includes within it, a vehicle computing unit for converting the command and control messages from the common standardized protocol into the proprietary protocol suitable for communication to a route control or flight control system on the unmanned vehicle. In this manner, various vehicle control stations that implement the standardized protocol for constructing messages could be used for communicating with the various unmanned vehicles no matter what proprietary protocols are required internally onboard the unmanned vehicles. However, in placing the vehicle computing unit on-board the unmanned vehicle, there now arises the potential for a failure of either of the vehicle processing system or the vehicle computing unit to result in a complete loss of control of the unmanned vehicle. Hence, there is a strong heartfelt need for alleviating this potential loss of control of the unmanned vehicle now presented in many of today's current unmanned vehicle designs that make use of an on-board vehicle computing unit.